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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
- k__ 5y agoCan it be made more effective?
- bruce343434 5y agoMaybe by using a different animal, such as a human
- HPsquared 5y agoThere are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article. Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.
- StavrosK 5y ago> If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. That's... quite the leap. The entire point is that ethics committees are much more averse to human testing than to animal testing, so we're less conscientious about animal testing.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoIn ... all countries?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoYes, it's safe to say that, in all countries, people are more comfortable with animal testing than with human testing. The quality of results from human testing is many orders of magnitude better; if you're willing to do it, there's no point in doing any animal testing.
- tffgg 5y ago1. He refered to countries using humans for testing being a leap 2. Using humans for testing makes no sense bc. animals are exactly used to avoid early testing on humans
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhat do you believe is the conflict between these two statements? >> if you're willing to do [human testing], there's no point in doing any animal testing. > animals are exactly used to avoid early testing on humans These are two statements of the same idea.
- tffgg 5y agoSince ethics has been invented for human society, there is no surprise for being averse to humans. Neither is that good or bad by nature
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cute_boi 5y agoI think this is a bad take. Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst. There are many cases of this one example is [1] Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured and after testing is over they are simply killed. But you know companies don't think animal deserves to live. We can use simulations etc but you know its hard to change culture. 1. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ethics-in-human-experimentation-in-science-based-medicine/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ethics-in-human-experimenta...
- giantg2 5y agoThe use simulations for many things already. That hell's them to determine what to test on animals in many cases, and still they have failures. It's very had to simulate things that we don't know everything about. That's why they do the testing.
- joshuaissac 5y ago> Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst. > Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured If animal testing involves brutally torturing the test subjects, then surely it would be much worse for poor human test subjects if they are swapped in, compared to what they go through now. Those steps that involve torturous pain would have to happen with the human subjects instead of the animals.
- rmak 5y agopoor people aka men.
- cheschire 5y agoAgreed. A lot of testing is already done on poor people who are tempted by the income from clinical trials. If we remove animals from this process, the first time a lot of products will touch living tissue is during these trials.
- amelius 5y ago> Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so. Also, some Asian countries would get a huge advantage as they don't seem to care as much about animal rights, unfortunately. Anyway, it's a bad argument, but one that has to be taken into account as the practice won't stop anyway.
- foobar33333 5y agoOr human rights
- tffgg 5y agoHow can one claim it is ineffective when it is the most effective?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fabian2k 5y agoThere's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
- freddie_mercury 5y agoThe article specifically talks about this and you haven't really made a concrete reply to anything they say. The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
- carbocation 5y agoThe article doesn’t actually talk about it in any meaningful way. They talk about it in a statistical fashion: most animal studies are underpowered, most don’t publish, etc. And sure, I think we can all agree that nobody should be doing useless experiments, whether on animals or not. But that in no way proves the article’s argument, and it hardly even supports it. Are we going to test out new CRISPR therapeutic delivery systems in humans? We don’t have a non-living system that replicates a circulatory system, an immune system, and a liver. If the author has a suggestion for how to do things like this safely and effectively without animals, I didn’t hear it.
- pvaldes 5y agoFailing experiments and learning something in the process is the bread and butter of science
- fabian2k 5y agoThe article is makings lots of points, I don't find it well focused which makes it harder to make specific replies. For example it talks a lot about animal experiments in cosmetics, but one of the quotes mentions that those are already outlawed in the EU. So I'm not sure what the point is here, if it is to extend that ban to other countries the author should say so, and it's a point I'd certainly agree with. The author also claims to some extend that animal experiments can be replaced by other methods. In the general case this is simply wrong, you cannot replace all animal experiments. There are cases where you can gain similar information from other experiments without animals, and those should certainly be further developed. But this is really hard to discuss in general, the specifics matter here and not all animal experiments are equal. Animal experiments are also expensive and time consuming, if there are established and reliable alternatives they will find their use.
- throw737858 5y agoIn what way is it exploitative? Animals are not people, there is no way to exploit them!
- trainsplanes 5y agoThat's a viewpoint that's up there with "babies can't feel pain", which was also common until the end of the last century[1], but has completely vanished since then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
- valgor 5y agoAnything, living or not, can be exploited. Being a person or nonhuman animal does not exempt one.
- refurb 5y agoAre we exploiting plants when we grow them for food?
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoNot sure if you're being facetious not, but that is an interesting question. I'd wager that it isn't exploitative however, because plants are not sentient, and (AFAWK), do not have thought/feelings or emotions.
- lr4444lr 5y agoMuch as I don't like the ethics of animal testing, I don't see the cruelty inflicted as any worse than factory farming, and even quite a number of "pastured" or "free range" husbandry operations.
- jschveibinz 5y agoEthical treatment of animals is a high priority in sponsored research: https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorial/iacuc.htm https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorial/iacuc.htm
- valgor 5y agoA lot of that stuff is known as humane washing in the animal rights world. Exploiting and inflicting suffering onto animals is almost always unethical. The only way to treat animals ethically is to not test on them at all.
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoWould you still hold that opinion if you contracted an illness that can be cured as a result of animal testing?
- hairofadog 5y agoI’m not OP but speaking for myself, yes.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoWell, fuzzy cute ones anyway. Surely we can test on E-Coli? How about slime molds? Maybe the occasional insect? What about shrews - they are nasty and mean.
- markus_zhang 5y agoUnless someone can get out a replacement at least equally effective (and not too expensive), I think we have to rely on animal testing for some of the products.
- faebi 5y agoStill a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How about 10'000 monkeys? How about saving yourself? Your wife? Your child? Your children? Tens of humans? Hundreds of humans? Thousands of humans? I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human. We could talk about reducing it, but I would agree only once we replaced the meat industry.
- kj98uo 5y agoWell, how many other humans would you murder to save your grandma's life? Or your wife, your children, someone you love? What about terminally ill humans who have < 1 year to live (assuming the particular testing results won't get skewed by their particular ailments)? How about prisoners sentenced for heinous crimes? What about humans who are "not productive"? People who have been sentenced to more than 10 years? You might draw the line at other species. Someone else might draw it differently to not do experiments on intelligent species like whales, dolphins and primates (who are used in lab experiments too). Or someone might include the categories I mentioned above in the list of test subjects. The big second question is the effectiveness of transferring the results of tests from animals to humans. Coldly speaking, while there are experiments that yield useful results on animals, there are also extremely pointless experiments that are done for the sake of doing. I won't go on and on but to your statement about " I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human", would you do it to save Hitler (who is a proxy for someone who, maybe, you should think twice about saving)? I agree with you about replacing the meat industry but we can do multiple things as a species at the same time. We can work on replacing the meat industry, working on alternate ways of testing drugs, on understanding animal communications and language (and we keep finding new indicators of intelligence) and on reducing our footprint as we get technologically and hopefully culturally more sophisticated.
- endisneigh 5y agoI don’t understand, you’re willing to kill tens of thousands of animals to save a single person, but are against meat consumption- an activity that inherently provides nutrients to sustain a human life?
- tlarkworthy 5y agoNeuroscience is built on animal testing. I can't see a realistic was of learning about the brain without animal experiments, unfortunately. https://speakingofresearch.com/2015/12/10/importance-of-animals-in-neuroscience-research/ https://speakingofresearch.com/2015/12/10/importance-of-anim... Do we want to give up learning the brain? (And other organs but brain is extra special)
- metta2uall 5y agoIf animal experiments were banned in neuroscience I think it's likely that would force the development of new technologies for studying the brain that would actually accelerate progress in neuroscience - "necessity is the mother of invention".
- ghodith 5y agoThat seems unlikely. Look into techniques like ICSS which have no non-invasive substitutions. Banning animal experiments in neuroscience would just eliminate large swaths of research pursuits, leaving only observational techniques like FMRI, which would slow down the science greatly.
- metta2uall 5y agoIt's not just FMRI - what about blood tests looking at gene expression, computational methods, tissue engineering, and stuff that hasn't been invented yet? Regarding ICSS though, I've had a look and I really fail to see how this technique is benefiting humanity..? For example they've discovered more detail about where cocaine affects pleasure/reward neural circuitry - so what?
- ghodith 5y agoThe point wasn’t FMRI per say, just that it would limit the science to observational studies like FMRI, which cannot reproduce the results of things like ICSS. Also such research may have large implications for understanding and treating addiction. The first step is understanding it.
- endisneigh 5y agoTLDR: instead of testing on animals we should use computer simulations and tissue cultures instead. The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest. The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering. All in all I think the post is bad
- giantg2 5y ago"we should use computer simulations" As much as I like technology, I would be afraid to use a drug that was only tested this way or even in cultured tissue. The biological system is too complex with too many unknown factors for me to believe this is highly effective method for everything.
- soyftware 5y ago> history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering By causing the suffering of living, sentient beings. There's a clear and obvious slippery slope here.
- ezconnect 5y agoHow would you know the simulator is accurate?
- eigenket 5y agoAs an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated. The difference in standards between "science animals" and "food animals" is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.
- wallscratch 5y agoYeah, but maybe this is an argument for treating the food animals, rather than ridiculousness of standards for science animals.
- eigenket 5y agoOf course, I agree. I hope my comment didn't imply otherwise. Actually I would argue for the wholesale reduction of the category "food animal". Its largely unnecessary, there are very few people (e.g. with unusual medical needs or living in unusual situations) for whom eating other animals is necessary.
- ummonk 5y agoImagine the two following hypothetical societies (we clearly live in neither society): A) humane open pastures where animals grow to middle age before being killed for food, resulting in expensive meat B) pure agriculture where land is cleared and irrigated for agricultural produce, completely devoid of animal life I would argue that society A would be better for animals than society B.
- eigenket 5y agoThe two situations aren't really comparable without more information. Clearly the people in A are still eating a craptonne of plants, and also have access to much more land per person than B, since they can afford to have a lot dedicated to very unproductive pasture.
- eesmith 5y ago> try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research. It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it's asking us to imagine ourselves, now in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don't live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death. In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research. > Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments. The first unmanned balloon flight had a sheep, a duck, and a rooster - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_unmanned_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_un... : "The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space comments "Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight." A few examples drawn from medical history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard - "Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US." Same page - "Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog's lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)" I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz - "Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn't pinpoint vitamin C.
- ekianjo 5y agoMost of toxicological studies are cargo cult level science, so yeah it's hardly surprising it's "ineffective". The worst part is that it is codified in regulations and it's now a political problem to fix it, which makes it a lot harder.
- amelius 5y agoWould you rather have your drugs tested on potatoes?
- elliekelly 5y agoAdult humans who have given informed consent would probably be preferable to potatoes. In most cases, at least.
- amelius 5y agoWhat if the human dies in 10% of experiments? What if it's 90%?
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoWhat if those people are people who can be exploited and coerced into "giving consent" because they are poor, and need the money?
- EvilEy3 5y agoWho cares, they're poor lolz, save animal lives. /s
- hairofadog 5y agoI’m guessing the “/s” stands for “straw man” in this case.
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- bambax 5y agoSpecism is based on several flawed assumptions. We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them. We also decide that because we are superior, we have all rights to do anything to members of "inferior" groups. But: - Superiority is at least debatable and strongly depends on the criteria used fot comparison; - There is absolutely no discernable logical link between being "superior" and having a right to do anything to the "inferior" beings. (For example, a human adult is "superior" to a human infant; but it doesn't give them the right to torture it.) We torture animals because we can, and because we don't think about it. But it won't last, because the more we think about it, the less acceptable it becomes.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago> We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them. That's painting things with a pretty broad brush, not everyone thinks this way. From conversing with people about the issue, those that do, do so mostly because they haven't actually put any conscious thought into it, even a few minutes is enough to knock down that straw man. Personally, I think humans are superior to other animals because we are more capable of feeling and thinking than they are. A bacterium or plant cannot feel joy, it cannot communicate pride in it's accomplishments to other members of its species, it cannot feel pain, it cannot suffer, it cannot develop into an adult which can do those things, it just is. A pig, dog, or dolphin can do many of those things, a chicken or fish can a little but much less so. Empirically, to me, this capability criteria sets a 'value' roughly proportional to their number of cortical neurons on a logarithmic scale.
- sweetheart 5y agoSo, a thought experiment: If an alien species came to Earth, and they were FAR more emotionally sensitive than we were, and could suffer MUCH more as a result, would that make your suffering when they start to enslave you any less meaningful? Would you understand, and allow yourself to be enslaved, or would you believe that it was still wrong for them to do that to you, even if they had the capacity to suffer more? I personally don’t think so. Can I feel a wider range of emotions than a chicken? Probably. Can I be upset or elated by more things than a chicken? Probably. Can the chicken still suffer? Yes. Can it be anxious? Can it be terrified? Can it be in pain? Can it be lonely? All yes. Whether or not it feels any if those things more or less than anything else is irrelevant when it doesn’t need to happen at all.
- soyftware 5y agoI like how the article starts with talking about software, because I find the case for ethical software, and ethical treatment of animals to be linked. There should be no animal exploitation. If humans want human things they should test on humans which volunteer to be tested on. Everything else is exploitive to others.
- tsbischof 5y agoMuch of the problem comes from the fact that there is insufficient incentive for the studies to be effective in the first place. The sample size issue is real and often justified due to a lack of resources, but this results in minimum publishable units which are anecdotal and an over-reliance on meta-studies which attempt to aggregate these positively-biased results. Increasing the sample size is not always possible, but sometimes there are alternative trial designs which can yield different but more reliable outcomes. Another aspect of effectiveness comes from whether the animal studies are actually designed to advance anything at all. For example, if the goal is to develop an imaging technique in humans, then the purpose of animal experiments is primarily to confirm that the idea is not wrong, debug the machinery and protocols, and generally get things to the point that the system is no longer the point of failure when running experiments on humans. Instead it is common to see series of publications on new imaging methods and contrast agents which grind away at small animals with no visible attempts to progress upward, which pushes back the time at which you can actually learn how the system works. Publishing this way is far safer but ultimately pointless: drugs for Alzheimer's is a classic case of optimizing for animals and completely missing in humans. This is at least partly why pre-registration of experiments is becoming normalized, as it is in human clinical trials. The goal here is to require basic statements of purpose and methods prior to execution, such that it is possible to improve the (often quite expensive and time-consuming) experiments beforehand and not during the manuscript review process. Many research groups lack this internal quality control and as a result some institutions are stepping in to require or provide it.
- metta2uall 5y agoLets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue/organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and currently animal testing is often the "easy" and "obvious" way to do something.
- ezconnect 5y agoHow would you prove the simulation and organ engineering works? Test it on humans?
- metta2uall 5y agoYou could go a long way with the standard scientific method - make predictions, do measurements, compare.
- ezconnect 5y agoCompare it to what? Compare it to assumptions? How do you test it? How would you know it's correct?
- refurb 5y agoImagine how quickly we come up with more efficient ways to get to the moon if we just banned all current rocket technology! (Thats silly. We’d just stop going to the moon for a few decades to centuries).
- mattkrause 5y agoNobody really LIKES doing experiments. Even in vitro work is slow, tedious, and expensive. Anything involving living organisms is orders of magnitude more aggrevating. If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't. The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans. It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly. We have a complete "wiring diagram" of its entire nervous system, we know the origin and fate of every single cell, it has been sequenced and probed and imaged with every technology under the sun. If there is an organism we should be able to simulate, C. elegans is it. But there aren't any good models of it, in the sense that you start a simulation and it behaves like a "real" worm. There are a lot of factors that we know we don't understand/can't model well: the passive diffusion of neuromodulators is probably important but is a nightmare to simulate. There are undoubtedly other factors we don't even know matter yet too. The worm is, of course, really simple. A human brain has about 300M times more neurons (and combinatorially-many more connections between them).
- omega3 5y agoUnpopular opinion but I'm yet to hear a convincing argument that the reduction of suffering is something that we should strive for. Edit, looking at the replies I'm disappointed in hn, expected better.
- eggsmediumrare 5y agoI have yet to hear a convincing argument that human life matters at all, but I operate as though it does because it feels like it does and in some sense that's all the reason you should need.
- eurg 5y agoIf the reduction of suffering is not something that you internally see as valuable, you might want to check with a psychologist (I mean that plain matter-of-fact-ly). While I can construct philosophical arguments and know what nihilism is, outside of thought experiments this is highly unusual for any individual capable of any empathy at all.
- omega3 5y agoThanks for the diagnosis, I think it's not as highly unusual as you might think. I bet outside of their relatively small social circles humans aren't preoccupied with reduction of suffering or altruism in any meaningful way. Of course, it's not a fashionable thing to say (see the downwotes) and I'd love to be proven wrong but I just don't see it.
- amusedcyclist 5y agoMost people may not be concerned with reduction of suffering but those that argue for not killing animals for food definitely are. I'm not sure why you think it has anything to do with being fashionable.
- dsomers 5y agoI disagree, the rate of vegetarianism has been increasing over the years and the rate of people demanding more ethical meat products e.g. free range eggs and chicken becoming more popular too. This is the free market catering to demand that was almost non existent 30 years ago.
- bronzeage 5y agoMorality and compassion are traits humans evolved in order to build society and have lasting social relationships. There's nothing natural about them, nature is full of animals exploiting, killing, hunting other animals. Nature limits compassion to family and sometimes tribe / pack. Imagine a lion with compassion for zebras. It's easy for those feelings to spill over to other animals over their intended purpose (building a human society), but people need to realize those feelings have overreached their purpose. I argue that the only reason this guy had written this article in the first place is the introduction of mice into his family, which triggered the natural response of compassion to family members. Humans only recently managed to convince themselves to extend compassion beyond their tribe, which is what they were programmed to.
- Omavel 5y agoThere is no alternative for animal testing.
- Jiro 5y agoHas there ever yet been a case of someone saying "animal testing is explotative, but it's actually pretty darn effective"? I suspect that it's motivated reasoning. If you don't like animal testing, it's going to distort your perception of how effective it is.
- anonlinear 5y agoThe claim that "probability of meaningful transfer between animals to humans can be astoundingly low, far below 50%" requires more scrutiny. Let's say drug b is being tested for treating condition A. Assume that it's found effective in rats. It seems the claim then is that probability of it also being effective in humans is less than 50% and sometimes 0%. But this in itself isn't a good enough argument against animal testing. If one can show that there were drugs c, d, e.. etc that were found ineffective in rats and as a result did not have to be considered for human trials. If there is a good enough probability that not effective in rats A implies not effective in humans, it will still lead to huge benefits to science and clinical trials.
- zbjornson 5y agoWe have no idea how many drugs would work in humans but are not being considered because they don't work in animals. If we assume it's about the same as the number that work in animals but don't work in humans, we're missing out on a huge number of therapies.
- xg15 5y ago> You may have heard of a recent scandal where researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN) intentionally tried to introduce bugs into the Linux kernel codebase as part of a research project. [...] This upset a lot of people – the Hacker News thread has received over 3000 points and around 2000 comments as I write this. I remember when that thread hit the HN front page. About 1-2 days before that, another article was on the front page: It was about how Facebook was experimenting on it's users by manipulating the newsfeed and inducing certain emotions - e.g., filtering posts such that positive news dominate the feed or such that negative news do. There was some outrage in academia and larger society over Facebook's behaviour and Facebook was largely accused of doing unethical research on nonconsenting subjects. The overwhelming opinion in the HN comments was that Facebook's actions were perfectly ethical: Facebook's users somehow already gave general consent to be experimented on when they signed up. Then days later, the kernel research story dropped and everyone was suddenly up in arms and quickly turned into fervent supporters of informed consent in research. Now talk is about actual lab animals and most posts apper very concerned about the various shades of gray on this subject. I find that does tell a lot about the priorities of the HN readership.
- detaro 5y agoYou might want to re-read those threads, because the community takes were not as clear-cut as you claim. (If anything, large threads often are a sign of non-agreement, because people strongly disagreeing creates more comments) And of course not everyone participates in every thread, which makes judging overall sentiment even harder - that someone comments less or not at all on one thread doesn't mean they don't care about the issue.
- disco_nap 5y agoAs an academic neuroscientist doing animal experiments, my hope is that animal research will eventually be obsolete, but think we are 1-2 centuries away from the required technology to do mechanistic and ethical experiments in ourselves. The article points out some questionable experiments but left out what we have learned/developed using animal models. This includes sars-cov-2 vaccines [1], the molecular identity of neurotransmitters [2], and gene therapies for SMA1, which typically kills children before their fifth birthday [3]. Animal activist's hearts are in the right place and we try to treat them as ethically as we can. I personally known several patients with ALS who have died and feel incredible urgency as a scientist. Animal testing is currently highly effective and irreplaceable. I would urge people who's perspective on animal testing is shaped by interactions with their pets to volunteer with charities that aid families with seriously ill children [4]. 1 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/america-facing-monkey-shortage/615799/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/america-... 2 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/classicessays.00026.2005 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/classicessay... 3 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1706198 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1706198 4 https://www.rmhc.org/ https://www.rmhc.org/
- fastaguy88 5y agoOne of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. For example, it is often argued that animal research is unnecessary because computer models are sufficient. Of this misleading article that conflates animal research with animal testing. It turns out that living this are complicated, and how they react to chemicals is largely impossible to predict. And humans still die of disease, and are interested in curing those diseases. And, we really don’t think that experimenting on humans first to answer basic biological questions, when almost identical processes occur in rodents, is reasonable. So we learn things first in animals. It’s fine to say that many drugs fail to meet expectations when tested in humans, but pretty much everything a physician learns about metabolism in a biochemistry course was worked out in rats or mice, and most of those things were never validated in human tissues because the human tissue is not, and should not be, available. And patients are better served by doctors familiar with biochemistry. One might argue that since we know so much, we have learned enough and further research in animals is unnecessary (or can be modeled). But while we now know most of the components of the body (at least those encoded by the genome), we are spectacularly ignorant of what those parts do, how they interact, and how those interactions respond to environmental changes (such as disease and drugs). And we can only explore those questions in animals.
- wumpus 5y ago> One of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. One of the features of arguments is that accusing people who disagree with you of being hypocrites is popular. It doesn't lead to a good discussion, though. In this discussion, you're cherry-picking an extreme position in order to misrepresent and then accuse a lot of people who haven't expressed that far out of an opinion. The usual consequence of that is that you end up in a meta-discussion (like this one), instead of a discussion, and then everyone is unhappy.
- nitwit005 5y agoThis makes the argument that a drug working on animals is weak evidence that it works on humans, but skips over the issue of toxicity. If drugs never had side effects, I'm sure everyone would be perfectly happy to immediately start with human trials. Why waste all that time?
- rob_c 5y agoGiven the small sample sizes it wouldn't surprise me if this was contributing to the reproducibility problems in biology.
- JamesBarney 5y agoThe author makes a couple of arguments. Some like "we should increase the quality of our research by doing more pre-registration because we are sacrificing these animals in the pursuit of science and when we do bad science we make the sacrifice for naught" yes 100%!!! But when he argues that there is poor translatability from rats to people (true) so therefore we should try doing more in vitro studies or going directly into humans. I think as bad as rat/mouse studies are in vitro studies have even worse translatability.